8 Killer iOS Apps That Shined at Macworld 2012

At this year's Macworld | iWorld event, iOS apps took center stage -- which wasn't hard for a trade show of ever-diminishing relevance. Apple no longer supports the show with the grand spectacle of an iDevice product reveal, and the event isn't even called "Expo" anymore. The show's tagline is now "The Ultimate iFanEvent," and last week's gathering felt more like a fantasy con than a buzzing hive of product announcements and demos.

But at least the 2012 show, which closed Saturday, had the Mobile Apps Showcase pavilion, which featured about 75 mobile app developers demonstrating their wares. We checked out the action, and here are our picks for the apps you need to know about most. They're not necessarily the best apps, but they point to interesting new directions for mobile content. Some have been available for a few months, others just launched, and others should debut in the coming months.

Totally Amp'd

Aimed at tweens, Totally Amp'd takes a 10-episode season of a Nickelodeon-style musical sitcom, and invites its young users to embellish the content with a suite of interactive features. The interactive elements look gimmicky on the surface, but demonstrate how traditionally passive video content can be, well, amped up.

The "show," as it were, is about a group of teens who form a pop group after being rejected by a music label executive. After you watch each segment -- the developer calls them "appisodes" -- you can interact with various elements of the show through in-app music, movie and design studios.

The design studio lets users create their own attire (e.g., dresses, jeans, sneakers), and all these items can be saved and shared with friends. The movie studio puts you in the role of video editor. You can recut a scene -- changing views and mashing up video clips -- to create a new version of what you saw. The music studio lets you record your own vocals and remix songs. For example, you can amp up the guitar to give a song a harder rocking feel, or turn up the strings for something more mellow.

"The teenagers that have been here are very interested," XMG Studio representative Lydia Schaele said at the Macworld booth. "They especially love the music studio, and that they can record their own voice." Parents have also shown a lot of interest in the app, Schaele said, as it encourages kids to be creative.

The app is free to try out with the first episode. But if the content reels you in, you'll have to make a one-time $5 in-app purchase to get the rest of the season's segments and complementary interactive activities.

iStopMotion

Hardcore computer users will argue that tablets like the iPad can't really be used for content creation -- that tablets don't have the processing power or precision control for content production. This new app shows critics they're wrong, leveraging the unique hardware package that only a tablet provides. Whether you're a budding filmmaker or just a bored iPad owner, you can have tons of fun messing around with the new iStopMotion iPad app.

The $5 app makes it exceedingly easy to produce entertaining stop-motion videos. The basic stop-motion technique, also called stop-animation, is perhaps most famously used in clay animation content, like the "California Raisins" commercial produced by LAIKA, but has also been employed in much more polished content. For example, the monstrous walking AT-ATs in The Empire Strikes Back were animated via stop-motion.

With iStopMotion, you capture your animation frame by frame, using your iPad's camera. As you shoot away, the app places an overlay of your previous photo over each new photo, granting better control over how choppy or smooth your resulting video will look. The app also has traditional time-lapse features, so you can set the iPad in a stationary position and let it snap away, rather than meticulously controlling each onscreen movement.

In either case, an instant playback feature lets you monitor exactly how your film is looking, and a shot-by-shot timeline helps remind you how each shot fits in with your story's big picture.

If you'd rather shoot with your iPhone camera instead of the sorely inferior iPad camera, there's a companion Remote Camera app you can use for the smartphone. Unfortunately, you don't get the convenient overlay feature on the iPhone app. iStopMotion was released in the App Store Dec. 21, and was given a "Macworld Best of Show" award.

Sky Gnomes

Foursaken Media is an app team of four brothers based out of Raleigh, North Carolina. They just launched a game in the App Store -- Mad Chef, a wild restaurant-management sim -- but it's their beta product, Sky Gnomes, that really caught our fancy.

Sky Gnomes is a racing game. You fall from the sky toward the Earth on your "snow engine," a joystick-operated snowmobile-like contraption. Your snow engine is powered by snow, so as you race, you have to pick up snow flurries that are also falling through the air for fuel. You can customize your ride with magnets and other trinkets that give you extra power, abilities and swag.

Now here's the real innovation: Although you don't compete against other players in real time, you still compete against "real" players. The app saves every player's race on a centralized server, and automatically loads other players' races as your Sky Gnome competitors.

TourWrist isn't new to the App Store, but it's about to get a killer new feature in its next update.

TourWrist lets you view 360-degree, panoramic views of rooms, landmarks and foreign locations so you feel like you're actually experiencing them in person. Currently, the content on TourWrist is professionally sourced, and includes everything from urban cityscapes and building tours to tropical resorts and lush forests.

The experience is impressive: It uses your iDevice's gyroscope so that as you turn your iPhone or iPad (up, down or around you in a circle), you see every inch of a scene. You can also switch to a mode that lets you control your view of the panorama with touch, but the gyroscope-powered mode is infinitely cooler. It feels like you're inside an invisible sphere of another world. The app is best viewed on an iPad for its larger, more immersive display.

Soon, you won't be limited to only viewing these stunning virtual scenes in-app -- you'll be able to photograph them as well. It takes about a minute to shoot a 360-degree scene, which is compiled from 10 different images. The app recognizes where photos overlap, and seamlessly stitches them together. Once that's done, you can name, save, and upload your panorama to Tour Wrist so others can share your experience. You can also share it on social media sites, or grab an embed code to put it on your website -- particularly useful for realtors hoping to attract future tenants, or businesses that want to show off their swanky digs.

Other apps offer similar 360-degree panorama features, but TourWrist feels incredibly polished by comparison, both in panorama execution and in its user interface. TourWrist also has an API available to developers so that other apps can use and publish to its platform.

Runmeter, Cyclemeter, Walkmeter

Abvio is a veteran in the exercise-tracking app space. The company has iterated its three sister products, Runmeter, Cyclemeter and Walkmeter, for version 7.0, making the collection one of the most obsessively complete app suites for monitoring and analyzing workouts.

All three apps are built on the same platform so they offer the same features, but are tailored to running, cycling, and walking, respectively. The apps tap into the GPS function of your iPhone, and help you track your activities on a map, in a calendar, and in graphs.

Abvio's apps are completely iOS-based -- there are no accompanying web apps, and all information about your exercise is stored in the apps themselves. The software trio features social media integration and text-to-speech technology. So, for example, if you tweet that you're about to break a distance record, and your friends tweet back to urge you on, the app will read those tweets to you aloud.

Version 7.0 includes an updated stopwatch feature that lets you track and display more information than pretty much any other exercise app around. It can display more than 150 different data statistics, broken down into time or distance-based "splits," like each mile of a bike ride. You can set up and personalize pages of information to get the statistics and visuals that interest you most, and the apps now have a history feature that saves all of your past workout info directly to your iPhone. You can go back and look at your past milestones by year, month, week or day, or by specific workout.

Runmeter, Cyclemeter and Walkmeter are $5 from the App Store.

MacPractice Clipboard

This isn't an app for everyone -- it's designed for doctors, dentists, optometrists, and other medical professionals. But it's an iPad app I hope to start seeing in offices across the country after it lands in the App Store in the very near future.

MacPractice Clipboard takes the pain and redundancy out of office visits. You know how you normally have to fill out form upon form, writing in the same personal information over and over again, even though the office already knows some of your data? This app streamlines that process, pairing with the MacPractice Mac app that's already available to physicians.

In short, it takes all the patient data already available in the Mac app, and delivers it to the iPad. All you, the patient, need to do is verify the information on the virtual forms, tap in anything that's missing, and then sign your name on a digital release form using your finger.

If an office has a few iPads floating around instead of pen and paper clipboards, MacPractice Clipboard could streamline dentist and doctor visits for every patient. And by keeping all of this information digital, it should make the lives of office staff much easier, too. Besides saving typing time, offices could eliminate scanning, printing and filing paper forms as well. For an eco-conscious office, this translates into fewer slain trees.

All of MacPractice's software (mobile and desktop) is ONC-ATCB 2011-2012 Certified. This means that offices and practitioners that take advantage of this app are eligible for some of the $19 billion in funding that's been set aside by the government for individuals who are trying to reduce medical costs and improve patient care by going digital.

Using MacPractice, or a similar app, is like a win-win-win. The only obvious losers are the paper and printer companies (sorry Dunder Mifflin!).

Splashtop

If you need to emulate your Mac or Windows desktop on your iPad, or you're dead set on showing some Flash video or animation, the Splashtop app (and accompanying desktop software) is one of the easiest ways to do it. The utility of Splashtop shows we haven't transitioned to a completely mobile world just yet, but that new era is certainly within reach.

Splashtop is a Macworld veteran, debuting at last year's conference. The cloud-based service lets you connect to a remote desktop or notebook over Wi-Fi, logging in from a web browser, and then accessing everything on your PC or Mac from your mobile device. This means all of your desktop files and programs will appear on your iOS device, all without syncing. You can even watch video from your desktop on your iPad, but only at 30 fps maximum.

Using the app is straightforward enough, although using one's finger as a mouse pointer can be a bit of a challenge -- and something Steve Jobs would certainly have cringed at. Splashtop would probably come in most handy when you need to share information with coworkers or clients at a meeting, and you don't have access to a projector, or when you need to share interactive data from your desktop that can't be accessed using other iPad apps.

Splashtop is $3, and its companion Mac and PC streaming software is free.

TurboViewer

Computer-assisted design on an iPad? Yes! CAD functionality isn't solely limited to high-performance, desktop computers. There is a number of CAD iPad apps available already, but TurboViewer is the first with a native DWG file viewer for iOS. You can pan, zoom or 3-D orbit through DWG and DXF files, plus tap into another two dozen file formats the app supports.

"The iPad is reinventing CAD with its portability, sensors, GPS, built-in camera and battery life," CEO Royal Farros said at the TurboViewer booth.

Dragging my finger from one view to another, looking at every angle of a 3-D model, was flawlessly smooth. And if you get lost in your 3-D diagram (an entirely reasonable possibility if it's even mildly complex), you can pull down specific views from the upper right corner.

Eventually, Farros said, you'll be able to use TurboViewer like an x-ray machine thanks to augmented reality. You'll be able to point your iPad at walls and see right through the walls to where pipes, beams, and electrical conduits are positioned thanks to blueprints in the app.

The TurboViewer booth also demoed "AngryCAD," an app that lets you take whatever project you're working on and explode it on screen. No, not explode it as in creating an "exploded view." Rather, the app virtually destroys the content using an open-source physics engine so that your castle, automotive design, or other structure bursts into pieces with maximum realism. Shouldn't every profession should have a cathartic tool like this?

TurboViewer is free and available now, and a Pro version packed with dozens more features (like the ability to convert file types in the cloud) is $20. AngryCAD should be available as a standalone app in the next few months.